


out there, somewhere

by renaissance



Series: renaissance sampler [10]
Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Epilogue, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Rain, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 16:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17145419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: Then I looked up at Francis, pale as the dead but for the bags under his eyes, and realised that our combined miseries might be infinitesimally more bearable if we were to bear them together. I blurted out, “Come back to Los Angeles with me.”Francis burst into laughter. “Oh,” he said, “you’re serious.”The one where it ends slightly differently: Richard leaves Boston, Francis follows.





	out there, somewhere

**Author's Note:**

> canon divergent as of the last couple of pages of the book. pure wish fulfillment. title from the smiths' "hand in glove." blessed by the word of god that it rained for all of richard's insane drive home from boston. i am so excited to share this fic!!!
> 
> dedicated with much love to the horsepeople gc, who aren't in this fandom but helped me with America Facts and let me bombard them with endless questions - in particular sab, for ameripicking the final product! (any outstanding errors are my australian fault.) also thanks to jo for brainstorming with me, as ever, and kukkii, the best cheerleader i could ask for.
> 
> a note of caution: as this immediately follows on from francis' suicide attempt, this fic deals fairly heavily with such themes. there is one scene that goes slightly into graphic detail re: scars; it's a short scene, and if you'd like to skip it, you can have a look at the end notes, where i've made note of to how to do so.

It was on my third attempt, only once Camilla had left Boston, that I managed to convince Francis that consigning himself to a life of repression and sadness was a bad idea. The first and second times I’d tried, I was sitting at his bedside and, Francis being Francis, he had a list of reasons why a lifetime of misery was desirable. These boiled down to the one thing: money. Francis had never lived anything less than luxuriously; even when Bunny was a drain on everyone’s income, Francis had got off relatively light on that count, as of all of us, he was the one Bunny liked the least, for all the obvious reasons. Looking like a man of leisure even in his white hospital gown, he said to me, “I can’t be cut off. This is all I have.”

One could easily imagine him as a sketched attempt at the tragic protagonist of a bourgeois novel, facing the sort of threats that ordinary readers would scoff at. Disinheritance? Of course, he had done nothing to deserve it in the eyes of any sane person, but it rankled me that he did not think he could work to get by. In reality it was more complex than that and, as much as I wanted to stay furious with him for the rest of my life, it really was a bit of a _situation_. He had no diploma, no credentials, had coasted through life on the coattails of his trust fund. That aside, he was unwell, and I do not only mean in the sense that he had limited use of his left hand.

What made me angrier than his refusal to do an honest day of work in his life was his insistence that marrying a woman he hated would be better. It would certainly be easier. I spent those nights by his bedside and in his apartment thinking back over our—I suppose I had better call it a friendship, at this stage in the story—and found myself unable to recall a single situation in which Francis had failed to take the easiest possible option. This made me even angrier. I wanted him to, just once, make a hard decision. Cruelly, I almost wanted to see him in rags and living off pittance. I thought perhaps it might humble him.

So, my third attempt: and, I think, if this one had failed, I would not have tried again. Francis was not so dear to my heart at that particular point in time, and I would’ve had very few scruples about leaving him there, adrift in his unhappy future. As it was, we sat down for lunch after Camilla’s train, with Camilla on board, had well and truly left the station. That very morning I had asked her to marry me and she had turned me down in the only way she could’ve: by invoking our mutual friend, dearly departed. I was still smarting and I was jealous, if you can imagine it, of Charles, running off on an impulse with his new lover. I was jealous of Henry, six feet under, not only because he still held Camilla’s heart but because he was dead and emptied out of the feelings that were now weighing me down. Francis’ attempt hadn’t helped my morbid mood, and I sulked my way through lunch, thinking that it was me against the world.

Then I looked up at Francis, pale as the dead but for the bags under his eyes, and realised that our combined miseries might be infinitesimally more bearable if we were to bear them together. I blurted out, “Come back to Los Angeles with me.”

Francis burst into laughter. “Oh,” he said, “you’re serious.”

I was. Camilla had gone back home and she had made it clear to me that it was for good; she had also spoken as though it was for the best that we never saw each other again, which I knew was probably true, but that did not mean I liked it. I still loved her, and would never, I think, forget how that felt so long as I lived, but there had to be room in my heart for something else.

“Why don’t you stay here?” Francis teased.

“I have to finish my dissertation.” Then, perhaps a bit mulishly: “ _I’m_ not the one who’s about to ruin my own life.”

Francis rolled his eyes. Intent on ignoring that last remark, he said, “Come on, Richard. I can’t live in California. Imagine what the humidity will do to my skin. The _sun_.”

He would burn to a crisp in the California sun, but there were plenty of places to stay indoors. “If that’s your biggest concern…”

“Of course not. You know I can’t—alright, let’s pretend for a moment that I’m entertaining this idea. What work could I do? Who would have me? Who would pay my hospital bills when I wind up back there again?”

“Your grandfather might change his mind.” I knew as soon as I said this that it was the wrong thing to say. Francis went red and puffed up like one of those long, thin balloons that clowns make into animals. Hastily, I added, “But even if he doesn’t, don’t you think you’ll be happier being able to be yourself? You know what they say about money and happiness.”

“I’ll cheat on Priscilla. I don’t care and I doubt she would.”

“You’re not a very good Catholic, are you?”

“But I mean, Cali _for_ nia,” Francis said, as though I had not spoken. He said _California_ in a passable mimicry of my accent. “Who would I fuck in California?”

I gave him a look.

“I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” he said, “but nothing’s changed. I don’t know if you’re—I’m not attracted to you.”

“I’m not attracted to you,” I said. “So we’re even.”

“So say I do this. I call off the marriage, my grandfather cuts me off, I move to California, I get a job at a—what do you have there?—at an In-N-Out.” His tone was scornful, but I smiled; I was pleasantly surprised that he knew the name. “Say I find my way into civilised society, I fuck a few pathetic closeted Hollywood-types… then what? I really wouldn’t know how to kill myself in California. Wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Ideally,” I said, “you wouldn’t try to kill yourself in California.”

“Where would I live?” he whined. “Would I sleep on your couch while I track down whichever circle of Hell is responsible for the minimum wage jobs?”

“We’d get a fold-out bed.”

“With what money?”

“Look, come, or don’t. I don’t care.” Actually, I think, even then I might have cared, but I was not going to tell him that when I still couldn’t work it out for myself. “But you’re asking me an awful lot of questions. Does that mean you’re thinking about it?”

Francis was sullen for a moment. He lit a cigarette. “I don’t know.”

“We’re the only ones left,” I said. This was the final card I had to play. “I’m all you have left of Hampden and you know it.”

“You sound like Henry,” Francis said sadly.

If anything could shock me, that was it. Francis looked at my _oh_ -shaped mouth with that expression he got sometimes, like he was ready to make note of what I said next and that it could, and _would_ , be used against me in a court of law one day. I wondered if I ought to go for his heartstrings, or alienate him even further. Either could get him to follow me; it was impossible to say. I didn’t even know that I really wanted him to follow me home. Whenever I’d tried to convince my old friends that I was acting in their best interests, they had seen right through me, assuming that I would not care _too_ much if, at the end of the day, they chose to drink themselves to ruin or whatever the self-sabotage of the day was to be. I did care, but I think it was a selfish sort of care. The happier they were, the less they would be leaning on me.

At last I said, “What would Henry say if you turned me down?”

Francis thought about this for a moment. “I think he would tell me that, in one sense, I made the right decision. But he would say it in a way so that it was clear he didn’t mean it; that he was saying what he thought would make me happiest.”

My chest grew tight. That was exactly what Henry would have said. He might have been impressed that Francis was playing the long game, holding onto his assets, but he would not have approved of Francis living in a Sisyphean purgatory, reaching for authenticity that was never within his grasp—God knows Henry understood how bad that could be. I could see on Francis’ face that he was going through these same motions.

“I’m renting a car,” I said. “I’m driving back.”

“You’re insane.”

“Are you any better?”

Francis looked at me with his knife-sharp gaze, only now it had a sort of blunt resignation to it. Still, it was the most life I’d seen in his eyes since I arrived in Boston. I knew then that he was going to come with me. I think we’d both known since the beginning of the conversation.

He put out his cigarette. “Apparently not.”

 

* * *

 

“Anyway,” I said to him the next morning, as I was lifting his overfilled suitcase into the back of the rented car, “your grandfather might die soon, and then you’ll have ready access to your fund, won’t you?”

He looked at me angrily and said in Greek, “ _Surely you are not suggesting we commit another murder?_ ”

“For old time’s sake.”

“I wish you wouldn’t joke about it. You’re just as bad as—”

Bunny; neither of us would say his name. I did feel bad for making the joke, though not because it had made Francis uncomfortable, but because the memory still clawed at my chest nightly with no sign that my torment would ever cease. While I was staying with Francis, he woke into petrifying darkness, hyperventilating, shouting. Each time, I was already awake. I lay there breathing quietly as the rain splashed against the window and waited for Francis to talk to me.

Francis hadn’t so much squared his affairs in Boston. He had withdrawn all the money he could get away with, in cash, now stowed beneath the passenger seat in the rented car. He hadn’t said goodbye to his mother—she knew my address, anyway, for her Christmas cards, and what’s more, Francis got it into his head that she might try to persuade him not to go. Privately, I thought the opposite: that she would have deemed our escape quite the romantic adventure. But I did not want Francis to think of it in that light, so I agreed, he oughtn’t tell his mother, not yet. As for Priscilla, he had been upfront and broken off the engagement. He didn’t tell me how she reacted. At the time, I assumed this was because it had been too unspeakably embarrassing a conversation to repeat—I knew how Francis was about these things—but, some months later, he told me it was because Priscilla had assumed I was his lover, and that he had not even wanted to entertain the thought. We were worried about the same thing; if we had perhaps taken a moment to air these concerns, we might have arrived at our inevitable conclusion a little earlier, and easier.

As it was, we had a five-day cross country drive ahead of us to work it out.

 

* * *

 

We were only half an hour out of Boston when Francis said, “You know, we could take a detour to Hampden.”

The radio was off. For a very long stretch of highway, there was silence. I was hesitant to break it.

“It’s back in the other direction. Besides, you don’t want to go back there. You’ll just have more nightmares.”

“I wish you’d stop telling me what it is I want.” I was driving; Francis slid down in the passenger seat and scrunched himself up until his knees were level with his nose. “Give me the map; I’ll tell you how to get there.”

“I want to get to Pittsburgh tonight. I can’t afford to spend much longer than five days in this car.” I meant that literally. The hire car company charged by the day, though I don’t suppose Francis had ever considered that sort of obstacle before. “I’m not driving to Hampden.”

“ _I’ll_ drive,” Francis said. “Would you give me the damn map?”

I took a moment to respond. It was like my mind went blank for a second; dangerous, when you’re driving, but very useful when you’re stuck in a conversation with someone like Francis. Hesitantly, I said, “I don’t have a map.”

“You don’t have a map,” he repeated, in the same tone that someone might say, _we are going to die_. In fact, the next thing he said was, “We’re going to—”

“Save it,” I said.

“What were you going to do, navigate by the positions of the stars? Stop every two hours to perform a spot of oneiromancy? Just keep driving and hope for the best?”

As he spoke, his voice became more frantic, rising in pitch and urgency. I began to regret the idea; I wanted more than anything else to take Francis away from that soulless life of his, but I wished it didn’t involve spending five days in a car with him. He had graciously offered to drive half the time. With Francis, I knew that meant he would take over for an hour, complain of a headache or foot cramps or something, and we would pull over to switch back.

“Actually,” I said, “I was just going to follow the road signs.” Before he could protest further, I added, “I looked at a map at the car rental place. Day one is Boston to Pittsburgh. Day two, Pittsburgh to St Louis. You get the idea.”

“I get it but I don’t like it. We’re going to get lost, and someone will find our bodies in a cornfield, after we’ve been pulled over, shot, robbed, and picked to death by buzzards.”

“Jesus. Okay. I’ll buy a map.”

We pressed on for another hour or so until we hit Hartford. I had never been there; Francis explained a little condescendingly that Connecticut was the poor man’s Massachusetts. “A bit far south,” he said, which I think must have been the first time anyone had ever said such a thing about Connecticut. I don’t know if he was doing this on purpose, because he knew my limited opinions of the east coast were malleable and wanted to make sure I was wholly on his side, or if it was something he genuinely believed.

Whatever Francis’ opinion of it, we did find a very useful newsagency in Hartford, which had fold-out maps of the states as well as a big, continuous one, which we didn’t buy but used to go over the plan. We bought a map for every state we’d pass through, except California—I figured we’d be fine once I was back in familiar territory. Francis paid for the lot of them; I don’t think he’d realised, yet, that he couldn’t keep doing this.

From there, it was only the long drive west. The rain persisted. Francis went into a sulk sometime after Hartford, as we lost sight of the city and then the suburbs, the roadside sidewalks replaced by a parade of trees, unchanging. Perhaps it was sinking in: he was leaving the east coast, with no saying when he’d be back. I kept looking at him, slumped against the car door with his knees tucked beneath him; it was almost enough to make me feel bad for being the one to wrench him away.

It was only then that I thought to ask him, “Did you tell Kim where you were going?”

“Kim?” Francis narrowed his eyes at me. For a moment, I believe he genuinely forgot his ill-fated boyfriend’s name. “Oh. No, we’re not—we haven’t seen each other in a while.”

I didn’t press. I did, however, think about what a tragedy his love life had been: first Charles, then Kim, who I had never met, but who I’d been assured I’d like. I liked Charles too. I didn’t like that Francis kept attaching himself to alcoholics. It _was_ sad, though, that he seemed to have found someone who cared about him, and it had so spectacularly failed to work out. I was assuming, unreasonably, that there hadn’t been anyone in between. There was no particular reason why Francis should have told me. I think I’d jumped to that conclusion because I had not dated anyone since Sophie. I always underestimated Francis.

I wanted to see him back to his usual spirits. “Francis,” I said, “why don’t you navigate for me? Since you were so keen on buying a map.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” he grumbled.

I looked out the side window so that he wouldn’t see me smile. “At least keep an eye on it for me.”

This area was not straightforward as the arrow-straight highways on our maps of the Midwest; the roads wound around forest passes and in and out of valleys. I began to think that I may actually have underestimated my task. Francis took to his role as navigator slowly but, eventually, with zeal. When he was back to sitting up properly, I knew he’d gotten past the worst of it. He even started to look ahead at the route, working out where we’d end up in advance.

If this sounds too good to be true, it’s because nothing could ever be so easy with Francis.

We didn’t stop for lunch; Francis claimed that he’d already blown his budget for the day on the maps, so in retaliation I bought gas station sandwiches for the both of us when we filled up the tank. The downside of this was that Francis did not stop complaining about how disgusting they were, and really, with him carrying on like that, I couldn’t be blamed for paying less attention the road signs.

Suddenly the trees were a lot more dense. Either side of the road was a brilliant emerald green, stately against the grey sky.

“Are you sure we’re on the right track?” I asked.

Francis peered intently at the map. “Absolutely.”

“This doesn’t look like highway.”

“Don’t you trust me?” Francis said.

That was a very stupid thing to say. He couldn’t have said anything that would make me trust him _less_. The road was quite empty, thanks to the rain; I pulled over.

“Where are we,” I said. My voice was tense. I didn’t mind getting lost, or even taking a little bit of extra time; I did not appreciate being deliberately led astray. “Francis, where have you led us?”

“Simmer down. We’re on the way to Pittsburgh. It’s just a bit of a roundabout route.”

I took a deep breath in. I wasn’t used to being the one close to panic, when Francis was about. “So if I keep driving you’ll get me back on the highway?”

“Of course.” Francis reached across and squeezed my arm. “Richard—”

“Alright,” I said. “Alright, I’ll keep going.”

I started the car, and then a loud noise bounced out from among the trees, like the crack of a whip, a car backfiring, or a gun. Car idling, I tried to grab the map from Francis. He held onto it, but his eyes were wide; we’d both heard it. The sound rang out again. It was nearby

“Are there hunting ranges around here?”

“Oh, fuck,” Francis said, valiantly managing to read the map while I was struggling to take it away from him. “I didn’t notice.”

“Shit!”

I let go of the map and slammed my elbow on the horn in my haste to get back to the steering wheel. Francis had led us off the main roads and into the middle of a hunting range. It hadn’t occurred to me, but trust the Appalachians to be full of men out with their guns in this weather. Francis probably imagined a stray bullet hitting him square in the forehead; personally, I was dreading any damage coming to the hire car, whether from a bullet or a stag on the road. I drove, with Francis alternately shouting out directions and grabbing my arm, shaking it, neither of which helped. I think I would’ve been furious at him, either way.

When we were safely back on the main road, Francis said, “Let me drive this leg. You read the map.”

 

* * *

 

By the time we got to Pittsburgh, I was back on speaking terms with Francis. I phrase it this way because Francis was certainly speaking to me; I accepted his apology the first time because I knew he hadn’t intended for his practical joke to land us in real danger, but I was still unhappy with him, and talking would only make it worse.

I cooled off. Francis and I had been through worse.

“Back in civilisation,” Francis said, as we drove into the centre of town. He was making eyes at the city lights; being a few hours in the countryside had really done a number on him. I hated to think how he’d fare on the next couple of legs of our journey. “Let’s look up hotels. Do they mark that sort of thing on road maps?”

“We can’t afford a hotel,” I said. “Have you ever stayed in a motel before?”

His silence said everything.

There were a lot of motels to pick from, which satisfied Francis that we’d find one to fit his needs; we got in late, because he spent forever choosing. We settled our things in a second floor twin room: Francis’ reasoning was that a serial killer—“They’re always at motels, you know,”—would go for the first floor rooms first. For the same reason, he insisted on sleeping in the bed furthest away from the door. “Not that I want you to die,” he said. “I think you’d be much better at fending off someone like that. You’d be able to save both of our lives.”

This was high praise for someone who’d been shot in the stomach by a stray bullet from a gun that I hadn’t even tried to wrest from the person brandishing it. I decided not to mention that.

We went out for dinner—the worst cheesesteaks I’ve ever had—and on the way home, walking with our collars pulled up around our ears against the light rain, we passed a phonebooth.

“Oh,” Francis said, “I suppose I had better call my mother.”

I waited outside the booth. We were on the outskirts of the city; skyscraper lights glittered in the foggy, navy night. The streets were lit well enough, but Francis’ paranoia was rubbing off on me. I kept looking around the phonebooth to see if anyone was coming in either direction. I would’ve heard, but Francis’ voice was raised. Not in an angry way, nor defensive. In fact, I think he sounded a little amused.

After five minutes of this, he pushed the door open with his bandaged hand. “Ow. Richard, she wants to talk to you.”

I stepped in carefully, so that the cord didn’t get tangled between us. There was barely room for one in the booth, let alone two. We each had our back to the glass; our knees were touching. Francis handed me the phone.

“Hi, Olivia,” I said. Francis scowled at me, and I rolled my eyes at him. “Francis said you wanted to talk.”

Her voice was a high-pitched wail: “Oh, Richard! Thank God you’re with him! I’ve been worried sick, when I called him and there was no answer… Priscilla told me he broke off the engagement, and then to think he’d disappeared… we all thought he’d managed to do it this time!”

“No,” I said. “It’s my fault. I asked him to come back to LA with me.”

“Oh, you asked him?” Olivia sounded thrilled. “He never said. Here I thought he chose to run off of his own accord, and you just so happened to be leaving. Well, this is even better!”

Under his breath, Francis said, “I _told_ Priscilla I was leaving with you.” So either Olivia hadn’t believed that, or Priscilla hadn’t conveyed it to her—to stir up drama? I’d barely met her, but I didn’t think she was a malicious sort. It was just crossed wires, which was not shocking, where Francis was concerned.

“We’ll keep calling,” I said, “so you know we’re safe. When we’re in LA I’ll give you my number.”

“I despise you,” Francis hissed.

“What was that?” Olivia said.

I kicked Francis in the shin. “Nothing. We’ll stay in touch.”

After that, I left Francis and his mother to yell at one another for another five minutes. He emerged looking like he’d been caught in a hurricane, and hit me on the arm.

“Next time mind your own business.”

“She was worried,” I said. Though, if it had been my mother, I would certainly have enjoyed it even less than Francis did. “She seemed genuinely upset you broke off the engagement. Does she know you’re gay?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then… ?”

“These kind of things are, historically, indiscretions. You fuck whoever you want while nobody’s looking, then you go back to your unhappy life and you don’t complain. Do you get it? You’re not supposed to deviate where I’m from.”

“Not where I’m from, either,” I said.

One corner of his mouth turned upwards. “Who’d have thought,” he said, “it’d be you and I?”

I tried not to think about what that meant.

 

* * *

 

“You have to change my dressing,” Francis said, waving his left hand in my face. He had just showered; he was wrapped in a towel, tracking water out of the bathroom, dripping off his bandages. “I can’t do it myself.”

We sat on his bed and I unwound the bandages. They started below the wrist and spiralled up, wrapped around his thumb and his palm for support. He couldn’t move his fingers right, but his thumb was the worst: it hung there, pale and numb, rendered utterly useless. The scars were healed over but still viciously red; I’d seen them in passing at the hospital, but not so close as I saw them now. Two parallel lines from the base of his palm, diagonal to the length of his arm, clearly showing the angle he’d been holding the blade.

“It’ll never be the same, you know,” he said. “Thank God I’m right-handed.”

“Do I need to use any disinfectant?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I didn’t bring any. It should be fine.” He dabbed at his wrist with his towel, drying it off a little. I did the rest with the corner of a bedsheet.

I unwound a new roll of bandage from Francis’ suitcase, and began to wrap it tight around his arm, as the previous one had been.

“Macabre, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t mind.”

Francis was looking at me like he was trying to figure me out. He opened his mouth and closed it again. I never did find out what he was going to say. I guess it was something like _thank you_.

 

* * *

 

Francis woke at five in the morning, screaming. We were out of the motel half an hour later; the proprietor came banging at our door, furious, saying he had complaints from half the patrons on our floor. We might have been allowed to stay a little longer, try to get back to sleep even for a while, but when the proprietor arrived we were both on the one bed, in our bedclothes, and I had my legs either side of Francis, pinning him to the mattress. This was to stop him from writhing, to calm his panic, but it did not look good. Even in the city, people could be narrow.

We sat in the car, me in the driver’s seat and Francis on the passenger side, not talking. Francis had a vacant look in his eye, like a shellshocked veteran. The sun hadn’t yet come up; I didn’t want to start driving yet, and Francis was in no state to drive at all. His hands trembled around a cigarette.

“Sorry,” he said. We hadn’t spoken for maybe twenty minutes, and the parking lot was empty. Francis’ voice was the only sound in the world.

“Don’t be,” I said. “You can’t help it.”

He kicked at the floor. “I wish I could. I wish I would never see their damn faces again.”

“You know it’s never so easy.”

“Damn it, Richard, let’s get drunk tonight.” Francis became animated all at once. “Don’t you think this country is so _dull_? There’s nothing here, these people are all so stupid. Once you leave the east coast…”

“You’d better not speak like that in Los Angeles.”

Francis laughed. “No. I’d better not.”

We left the parking lot as soon as the sun began to rise. Francis glued himself to the maps and barely spoke, but he had that intense sort of look in his eyes that indicated to me he was planning something. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending entirely on the circumstances—the weather, the phase of the moon, Francis’ mood. I suppose I always liked how fickle he could be; it brought me out of my head. I tried to tell myself it was something to look forward to.

The plan didn’t come together until we were much further down the road. I was trying to get Francis used to life outside the east coast, so I pulled in for gas at a locally-owned service station just outside Columbus. I’d driven right past an Exxon earlier; in my mind, I made something political of it, though I never said that out loud. I think a part of me imagined it was what Henry would do. The service station we stopped at had a sort of supermarket attached to it, too. It had been a couple of hours and Francis and I hadn’t made more than a tokenistic attempt at eating breakfast. I was starting to feel light-headed.

I left Francis in the car. I bought a Swiss roll for each of us and a bag of jerky, and I paid for them at the counter at the same time as gas. As the cashier was handing me back my change, his neck snapped up, and he said, “Hey! You!”

For a moment I thought the store was being robbed at gunpoint. My hands flew up out of instinct. I turned my neck and saw that it wasn’t a kid with a gun, but Francis, slipping out the door with a bottle of wine.

Thank God I had already paid. I grabbed the food and ran after him; he was already back in the car—in the passenger seat, the bastard—and an attendant who’d been filling someone else’s car at the pump was running towards him. I had no choice. I jumped into the driver’s seat, threw the food into Francis’ lap, and drove.

Francis was laughing wildly. “I can’t believe I got away with that!”

“You bastard,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing too. “You could have at least warned me you were going to pull something.”

I didn’t ask why he’d done it. His money was dwindling, and alcohol was not cheap. There was no way we would be getting drunk on our budget. Francis was clinging onto the wine like it was a newborn baby. He looked so proud of himself; it wasn’t like he’d never broken the law before, but there must have been something about his new life. He’d been cut loose from everything else. A spark so insignificant could become a wildfire. His happiness made it hard for me to be mad at him.

Then I caught a glimpse of the fuel reading. I banged a fist on the edge of the steering wheel. Francis looked at me, concerned. “I didn’t get the tank filled.”

“Sorry,” he said, laughing nervously. “I keep messing things up for us, don’t I?”

“You’re not a very good felon yet,” I said.

The tank had only been half-empty, so it was not a huge waste of money; I was determined not to lose my temper. This screw-up wasn’t much different from yesterday, but it was sinking in that we were only a day and a bit into our five day journey. I didn’t want to spend the entire time in a state, no matter how much of a nuisance Francis was being. We were travelling companions now, and soon we’d be living together. If he was going to be like this, I’d have to get used to him, wouldn’t I?

 

* * *

 

The wine heist had not been kind to Francis. He quickly devolved from upbeat to paranoid, looking out the window every few seconds to see if there was a cop car following us. He refused to put the radio on, so he could listen for sirens. He was like this all the way to Indianapolis, for a good three hours. By the time I saw the city up ahead it was early afternoon, and our tank was running near empty. I pushed on into Indianapolis; I wanted to go as long as possible before having to pay for gas again. Besides, I thought it might be nice for Francis if we stopped at a city café for a proper meal.

This was a good idea in principle, even if Francis didn’t realise I was doing him a favour, as opposed to considering a slightly posh café the default option, but it ended in disaster: Francis was too anxious to keep food down, and after lunch retreated to the café’s bathroom.

I squared the bill and then waited outside. I was starting to feel a bit hopeless about the whole thing. About Francis. I told myself it was because of the shock. He was recovering from a suicide attempt, and from the upheaval of leaving his life of privilege behind. Besides, though it was Francis turning my hair grey, I was the one who had suggested this. I couldn’t tell him I’d changed my mind and force him to go home from here—for him, it had been a do-or-die sort of thing, an irreversible decision. Anyway, I hadn’t changed my mind. It was only a momentary flash of malice that I was even entertaining the thought. The fact was, I cared for him. Even on those days when I hated him, I always had cared.

I must have been waiting over forty minutes for him to come out of the bathroom. I didn’t realise so much time had passed—I suppose I was zoned out—until I saw the hire car pull up in front of me. I blinked, checked my watch, and when I looked back up it was definitely Francis there, sitting in the driver’s seat with a cigarette awkwardly tucked into a loose corner of his bandages. He rolled down the window all the way down and waved.

“What the hell?” I said.

“You didn’t notice me leave,” he said. “Off in a world of your own. So I thought I’d surprise you.”

He gestured for me to come to the window, so I did. He pointed to the dial on the dashboard, showing a full tank. I slumped down, leaning my elbows on the windowsill. Was this his way of apologising? If it was, it worked a charm.

“Oh, Francis,” he said, putting on an exaggerated California accent, “you shouldn’t have!” He let the mask drop and flicked me in the arm. “Come on, get in.”

I did, speechless. Francis had the radio on; he hummed along as he drove. After maybe a few miles, I managed to say, “Thank you.”

Francis only shrugged. He was in good spirits. I didn’t say anything else—I didn’t want to ruin it.

 

* * *

 

We didn’t go through with getting drunk that night. The wine seemed tainted, somehow. We placed it reverently on the desk of our motel room in St Louis and didn’t touch it.

This motel was smaller than the last, and rattier. There were plenty of nice ones around but I wanted Francis to get used to the simple life: the room we were staying in now was about the size of the living room in the place I rented, which was where Francis would be sleeping. This room had one small desk by the window and two narrow twin beds, with only about a foot between them. The bathroom was the size of a modest wardrobe.

Though there was no couch or fridge, they had somehow managed to fit a TV into the corner. We sat on the floor in front of it and I fixed Francis’ bandages while an episode of Dallas played in the background. Neither of us regularly watched TV; I didn’t even own one. It was a bit of a treat.

“This place is horrid,” Francis said, in a sort of affectionate manner. “Maybe I’ll wake up screaming and get us kicked out again.”

“Don’t you dare.”

His head was tilted down to watch me work, and he looked up at me from beneath his long, fire-red eyelashes, a conspiratorial smile at his lips. “Why, Richard, didn’t you enjoy yourself, pinning me down?”

I went red. “Francis.”

“You’re too easy,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll try my best not to keep ruining things for you.”

“Is there anything you can do before bed?” I asked. “Something to help you sleep?”

“Drugs.”

“I’m being serious.” I fastened the last of the bandaging, and held onto his hand for a moment. “If there’s anything I can do…”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Francis said. “Just be your beautiful self.”

At least he was in a good mood. All jokes aside, Francis did sleep well that night. I know, because he passed right out, whereas I barely slept at all until about three in the morning, according to the clock on the small dresser wedged between our beds. I woke some hours later to the curtains flung open and light pouring into the room. Francis was fully dressed and, to my amazement, completely drunk.

He waved what was left of the bottle of wine at me. It was a Chardonnay. “Want a sip?”

“No, thank you,” I said. I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “How long have you been awake?”

“Time,” Francis declared, “is an illusion.”

“Okay, one thing at a time. You’re drunk. We need to get on the road.”

I got out of bed and tried to take the bottle from him, but my reflexes were sleep-slowed, and Francis had the advantage of being ready to go, whereas I still had to dress and all that. He knew that he had won; he remained smug and attached to the wine all morning, as I made sure we had everything and carried our luggage out to the car.

Francis climbed into the backseat and lay sprawled there. He passed out minutes later, fast asleep. The bottle of wine slipped out of his fingers and onto the floor beneath my seat. I had never seen someone get so drunk this early in the day—outside of college, of course, but there was a stark difference between drunk on the Commons and drunk in the backseat of a hire car. I had to admire Francis’ determination: wherever he was, he was going to run his life into the ground or die trying.

The rain, which followed us all the way from Boston, still had not ceased. It did wonders for our changing landscape. I had never liked the idea of the Midwest, but, never having been there myself—I would not count the series of buses I took to Hampden as a state of _being_ —I always painted it as something of a dismal place in my mind. I was almost pleased to find that it was exactly as I always anticipated; at least the weather matched everything else. I could not imagine these places on sunny days: harsh light presiding over swathes of concrete and cornfields, the long, eerie shadows of powerlines stalking me as I drove.

I was driving along a length of highway in Kansas with tall corn either side when the rain turned to hail. Francis slept through the first of it; thank God he didn’t snore, because I don’t think I would’ve been able to cope with that as well as the hailstones on the roof of the car. I was not so prone to bouts of anxiety as Francis, but even I worried about getting the car in too much of a state, and having to pay extra upon its return. Neither of us could afford that.

When the hailstones got larger, the rain louder and the wind more ferocious, the car began to veer beyond my powers of steering, and Francis woke. He sat upright and pressed his back against the seat, breathing hard.

“Easy,” I said. “We’ll be out of this soon.”

“You couldn’t possibly know that,” he said.

I was getting tired of driving with a doomsday prophet in tow. I didn’t reply.

Francis said, “We’re going to die in this car.”

I’d shared this sentiment from time to time, but now I was determined to be upbeat. So Californian, as Francis would say. “Relax. It’s just hail.”

“Just hail?” I looked in the rearview mirror, and Francis was running his good hand through his hair, his fingers a frantic comb. “What if it breaks through the windows? Do you know how much we’d have to pay if we damage this car? God, we’d have to dump it in the cornfields and walk to the nearest town. In the rain. We’d become outlaws. Can you even see where you’re going?”

He had a point there, but I wasn’t going to concede.

“Richard, come on,” he said. “Oh, God—”

I drove on for a minute longer in silence before the heaving of his breath became too much to ignore. I looked back again and he was clutching at his chest, folding in on himself. The rain was incessant; even with high beams on, the road was unclear.

I pulled over. The corn offered us a little shelter, from one angle at least. “Better?” I said.

“I think I’m dying,” Francis gasped.

Without the engine running, the _plink_ of the hailstones on the roof of the car was louder than ever. Francis was shaking; now his idle hands had roved to his wrists, and he was clawing at his own skin and bandages. I sighed, and climbed into the backseat. I wrapped my hands around his wrists, prying them away from one another.

“Go away,” he said; it did not sound like he was petulant, rather genuinely afraid. I didn’t know what awful memory this reminded him of—maybe it was too close to snow? Still caught in my grip, he pushed at my chest, trying to shove me back. Maybe, I thought, he wasn’t scared of anything in particular. He just was.

I was holding on to Francis while he was trying to force me away. I didn’t let go of him; I suppose I didn’t want to see him hurt himself again. We were like this for some minutes, this tug-of-war as his chest heaved and his eyes darted wildly around the car. There were tears falling down his cheeks, though I couldn’t describe it as crying. Just as I thought he might be calming down, his panic swelled again, and then, rising out of this push-and-pull, I kissed him.

It’s important that I emphasise this sequence of events: Francis had kissed me once before, and indeed was the one of us more inclined to do such a thing, but on this occasion it was the opposite. I don’t remember anything immediately leading up to this but I do remember that somehow my hands had moved to the back of his neck, and then I kissed him, in an almost perfunctory way. Maybe I thought it would distract him. I really can’t say. All I know is that I was the one who kissed him. Not the other way around. There was a moment of quiet when even the rain and hail seemed to cease; Francis’ eyes were right in front of mine—thank God he had stopped wearing those superfluous pince-nez—and he was perfectly still, statuesque with his skin like sun-bleached marble and his large, searching pupils. The eye of this storm was not to last long, and when it had passed, we were kissing, properly.

This time there was no Charles to interrupt us—indeed, we must have been the only two people for miles around. We were in the backseat of the hire car and there were hailstones clinking on the metal roof, the glass windows. To one side there were tall, green stalks of corn; to the other, only fog.

We must have been determined to wait out the storm, because we stayed in the backseat for a very long time. For a while we were just kissing, and then… there really is no way to talk around it: we went about as far as you can go with no prior warning. It didn’t seem like a terrible idea, at the time. Francis wasn’t panicking. At first, I thought I might panic. I had never been this far with another man before. In fact I only had that one kiss with Francis in my history, and I thought it really was history. What was I doing? I tried many times, while we were in the backseat, to get to the _why_ of it, but then Francis would do something with his fingers and my mind would catch on the edge of realisation. I didn’t work it out.

Afterwards, we just lay there for a while. The hail had stopped and now it was heavy rain. The fog was thick. I didn’t know how I’d be able to drive after that.

“Richard,” Francis said. His voice was unlike I’d ever heard it. His head was on my chest. “We should get going.”

I made a noise, shut my eyes.

“I’ll drive,” he said.

This could have been a bad idea: he may still have been drunk. But we need need to be on the move, if we wanted to make Denver. I didn’t know, at the time, that Denver was long past the point of feasibility. So, blearily, I said, “Alright,” and Francis pulled on his clothes and climbed into the front seat, where the key was sticking out by the steering wheel. He drove on.

 

* * *

 

We weren’t talking. I suppose it made sense that we weren’t talking, because for the next half an hour or so, I was struggling to put my clothes on in the backseat of a moving car, which was significantly harder than I expected it to be. Francis reached a hand back at one point to have me light a cigarette for him. The lighter was in his pocket, so I had to lean forward and around him, blushing as I fished it out; of course, we had now done far worse, but I wasn’t ready to get over myself just yet. Francis wound down the window by a few inches. He had the cigarette in his right hand and his bandaged left hand on the steering wheel, sleeve splattered with rain. I sat at the right so I could look at him; I didn’t want to, but I was forcing myself. I was still trying to work out why it had happened.

I got the impression that Francis wasn’t so much ignoring me as waiting for me to make the first move. I was thinking about it, building up to it, but I never got the chance. Francis pulled up unexpectedly. He stubbed his cigarette butt on the steering wheel. For a moment I thought he was panicking. Then a gust of wind cleared the rain and I saw a woman standing by the side of the road.

Francis leaned over and rolled down the window. “Where are you headed?”

“Not far from here,” the hitchhiker said. “Can I get out of the rain?”

“You may sit in the passenger seat,” Francis said, unlocking the door, “until I am certain that where you’re going is nearby.”

The hitchhiker looked at him like he was mad, which, in all fairness, he was. She got in the car and shook some of the rain off her heavy fur coat; Francis flinched away, although he was already damp.

“Richard, get the map.”

The maps were under the seat. I emerged to see the hitchhiker looking curiously at me. She was drenched but I could see that under all the rainwater she had curly hair. She was dressed like a new romantic, under her coat. She was pretty, I suppose. I sat there and tried very hard to think about how pretty she was.

“Richard,” Francis said. He was glowering at me from beneath unnaturally long eyelashes. The hitchhiker, the hitchhiker, I thought. Francis had such a way of looking right through you.

“Right, sorry,” I said, and flicked through our collection of maps until I found Kansas. “We’re… somewhere around here. Where are you going?”

The hitchhiker poked a red-lacquered fingernail onto the paper and a damp circle spread around the spot. “Here,” she said. “St Francis.”

I let out an incredulous laugh. Francis put a hand to his chest. There were probably a lot of St Francises in Catholicism; I really wouldn’t have known. There was only one in this car, haloed by light bouncing off the windshield, fragile as a tempera and gilt portrait atop a reliquary. “That’s my name,” he said, like he couldn’t quite believe it.

“Cute,” the hitchhiker said. “It’s before the exit to route 27, next to the airport. You can’t miss it.”

“Did we just pass 117?” I said, squinting at the map.

“I think so,” Francis said. “Thank God you’re paying attention.”

“You were the one who wanted to buy the map,” I reminded him. “I was always going to be looking at the road signs.”

“I really need to be there soon,” the hitchhiker said.

Her name was Annalisa, I found out as we drove. She lived in St Francis and had been on a trip to Kansas City with friends; on their way home they had argued, and she’d been booted out of the car. For a moment I wondered what kind of “friends” would do such a horrible thing, but upon further meditation I realised I could imagine any of my old ancient Greek classmates doing exactly that. Perhaps not in a hailstorm. Annalisa’s friends must have kicked her out around the time Francis and I were pulled over.

We drove her to St Francis, which was a sizable city for an area as desolate as this. We drove her right to her front door; the streets were arranged in a grid and there was something a little uncanny about all of it. I think Francis thought so too—seeing his name everywhere couldn’t have helped—but we didn’t talk about it. Even after we’d dropped her off.

“It’s late,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find a motel nearby.”

Francis hummed. “Maybe.”

After a couple of circuits of St Francis we found a blinking vacancy sign outside a motel that looked like it could have no more than ten rooms for guests. There were three cars out front. The rain had slowed to a light but steady scattering of droplets; when we parked, I was pleased to see that the hail hadn’t dented our car. As for us, we were still basically dry when we got ourselves and our luggage inside. Francis with his massive suitcase had been attracting curious looks wherever we went; at this motel, the young woman at the desk didn’t even glance up. She was smoking something potent.

“A twin room for the night, please,” I said. I handed her my credit card.

“Where you from?” she said. Now she looked up, curious. “Don’t get many of your type out this way.”

Francis replied: “Boston.” _Bah_ sten.

The attendant laughed. She could see my Bank of California card. I was wondering what _our type_ was. Because I was always looking at Francis, I had some idea in my head of how he came off to other people. Well-dressed but a little shabby; smelling of rainwater and cigarettes; one bandaged hand resting on the counter, sleeve not quite long enough to hide that focus of the injury was his wrist. I thought about how I might come off: next to this saint walking the Earth, a man dressed in old jeans and an anorak, with a haircut I’d clearly done by myself; freckled skin and chapped lips; a Socal drawl. We were about the same height but that was it. Didn’t look like we were the same _type_.

We got two keys for the twin room; it was on the second floor. Francis went up ahead of me; I carried his suitcase up the stairs, and he had my duffel bag over his shoulder. The suitcase was easier with two working hands, but I still worried about what it looked like, that we paused at the bottom of the steps to swap.

Francis unlocked the door, and held it aside to let me in. He’d already put my bag down by the bed nearest the door. I struggled with the suitcase for a minute, maneuvering it around a narrow corner, and once I had let it go Francis’ hands were on my shoulders. I looked at him like a deer in the headlights, but I don’t think he cared, because he kissed me anyway. I was too startled to do anything other than kiss him back. It might have been seconds, minutes, before my brain caught up with my mouth, and I pushed him away.

“I can’t,” I said.

Francis was still holding my shoulders. He had an expression like he’d been sucking lemons. “Well why the fuck not?”

I didn’t immediately know how to answer that, when only a few hours ago, in the back of the car…

“Richard,” he said.

“I’m not…” I frowned. “I told you I asked Camilla to marry me. It’ll never happen, but I still… Francis, I can’t.”

“Oh, for—” He let go of me but took a step closer. “You’re useless. You’re just like Charles. You think you want one thing but you’ll take what you can wherever you’ll get it, and then you’ll throw me away when you’re done with me.”

For some reason—a reason that would only become evident to me some days later—the part of this apt criticism that stuck in my mind was the mention of Charles. Francis had been in love with Charles; for all I knew he still carried a torch. Did this mean that he was in love with me, too? I realised after the fact that it was not meant to be a favourable comparison. In fact, Francis was being the hardest on himself: he sure knew how to pick them.

“Fuck this,” he said, keys jangling as he opened the door.

“Are you leaving?” I asked dumbly. “You can’t live in St Francis forever.”

“I’m going out for a smoke, you idiot.” He paused by the door, watching me for any reaction; I was determined not to give it to him. There must have been something in my face, though, that made him say, “I’m not leaving you, Richard. I couldn’t and I don’t want to. I’m following you across the country, so I think you could stand to do me a favour and sort your shit out.”

Then he left. My eyes, absent and unfocused, stuck to the wooden panelling that slammed behind him. It was beginning to hit me that the last thing I wanted, of anything, in the world, was for him to leave me. In fact I felt stupid that I’d ever considered leaving him in Boston. It wasn’t just that we only had each other, though that was also true: it was something deeper, that I couldn’t name yet.

I showered and went to sleep before he got back from his smoke. I didn’t wake when he came in, and if he panicked I slept through it, but when he stirred in the morning he was there, fast asleep in the bed by the window, and the day began anew.

 

* * *

 

We were behind schedule. Once we crossed the border into Colorado the landscape quickly went from cornfields to forest. We were at a higher altitude too, and the rain that fell was mixed with sleet and dizzyingly steep. It was a bit like being back in the Appalachians, in that I was on edge about where we might find ourselves if we took a wrong turn. On the other hand, the roads were far more straightforward. I was driving, as was now my habit in the mornings, and looking at the map myself.

Francis might have been alright to help with the navigation, but we weren’t talking. The rain was back to being loud enough that talking would have been an exercise in futility. That wasn’t why.

I knew I’d screwed up. It was one thing to kiss someone and tell them it could never happen again, and our friendship had survived that one very sturdily. Entirely another thing to sleep with someone—the closest thing I had to a best friend, at this point—and then act like it never happened, would never happen, wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d used Camilla as my excuse, but I didn’t think that was quite right. I was slowly making my peace with the fact that I’d never see her again. Was she only my excuse because she was a woman? I had wanted to tell Francis I was straight. After what had happened between us, I didn’t think he’d buy that one.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure if I bought it, either.

I was half paying attention to the road signs, half rehashing my last conversation with Camilla in my head, when something occurred to me. “Did you love Henry?” I asked.

Francis took a moment to respond. I got the feeling he was looking at me strangely, though I didn’t dare check. He said, “Where’s this coming from?”

“I don’t know,” I said. That was a lie. “When I asked Camilla to marry me, she said to me she couldn’t, because she still loved him. I told her I loved him too.”

Francis was silent for a moment. Then, “ _Did_ you?”

“I asked you first.”

He sighed. “You forget I knew Henry before you. Before the lot of you, excepting—” Bunny. “I was attracted to him, of course. I suppose I thought about sleeping with him, but it would never have happened. Well, at the Bacchanal, we… anyway, the point is, I figured out early on that it would’ve been a very poor idea indeed to fall in love with Henry.”

“Good thing Charles came along.” I knew it was mean but I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh, very funny,” Francis said, “coming from you.”

“What are you—”

“Come on, Richard, you spent more time mooning over Charles than I did. You went all soppy and glassy-eyed around Camilla but Charles could never do wrong in your eyes. Don’t pretend you didn’t adore him.”

“And you didn’t?” This was an unfair accusation to turn on me, though entirely correct. “You told me yourself—”

“I was into him, alright. He was always good-looking. I would wager he’s still good-looking now, living in a dive in Corpus Christi, or wherever. Alright, yes, I sent him money. I care about him, I cared, in a way, but it shouldn’t have been love. A pretty face makes up for a multitude of sins. I loved the _idea_ of him.”

I hated hearing Francis talk this candidly. He was always so wrapped up in obfuscation that, whenever he chose to be plain, there was something alarming about it. I liked thinking I was one of the few people who knew him, the real him, but when confronted with that reality, I retreated into frustration.

“And what about me?” Francis said.

I kept my face forward and only looked at him out of the corner of my eyes. “What about you?”

“You loved Camilla, you loved Charles, you loved Henry. Did you love me too? Did you love—”

Bunny. He wasn’t going to finish that sentence. I could tell he was trying to distract from the weight of the question he’d just asked, but now it hung between us, cold and crystalline in its clarity.

Did I love Francis? If I do now, I certainly didn’t then. When I think back to the haze that constitutes my emotional memories of my time at Hampden, I remember feeling fondness for Francis, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes like a background noise to the rest of what was going on. I remember being annoyed at him more often than not. I remember a few visceral moments of hating him. I do not remember feeling anything I would call love.

“Jesus, Richard,” Francis said. I hadn’t said anything at all; my silence was incriminating. He kept talking: “We were all in love with each other. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together at the country house, the six, the five of us. What is that if not—well you know what I think? I think you never loved me the way you loved the others. You never let yourself try, with me.”

I didn’t want to respond, but I knew the cadence in his voice meant he wanted prompting. “What makes you say that?”

“Charles would never fuck you. Camilla would think about it, she’d string you along a little, you know. It wouldn’t even have occurred to Henry. Me? I was right there. I was an _option_. I think that scared you, because you never, you still don’t want to admit that you like men.”

Francis’ voice was heated; I managed to keep a cool exterior, I don’t know how. This had been on my mind since we left Boston together, all that time I had spent worrying about whether people thought we were a couple. Francis was right. It was too real. It could happen. It _had_ almost happened; I tried to recall what had been going through my head when we first kissed, but I was so high at the time that I don’t suppose there was anything in my head at all.

I had never confronted this before. Not so plainly. Now I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the road ahead; I think my mouth was hanging open a bit.

“I’m not trying to convince you to sleep with me again,” Francis said, defeated. “I don’t want to be with you. I just want you to admit it to yourself.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Is that all?”

“I don’t know.”

But something at the back of my mind was emerging from its cocoon. Francis said he didn’t want to sleep with me, which I knew was a lie, but did he really not want to be with me? The basis of our relationship was no different to what it had been when we set out from Boston: we were old friends, and I was driving him away from a dismal sort of future. I hadn’t asked him to come with me because I was madly in love with him and couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him married to someone else. Presumably, he hadn’t followed me in romantic pursuit, either. So why did that upset me?

It seems obvious now, but sitting at the wheel of that car, I couldn’t for the life of me explain why I so badly wanted Francis to be in love with me.

 

* * *

 

We passed by Denver, determined to press on. Francis complained, of course; cities appealed to him, even ones as provincial—his words, not mine—as Denver. Our pit stop for lunch was at a ski resort in the Colorado mountains; a place, fittingly, named Loveland. There was a small chalet with a restaurant where we sat down to eat well beyond our means. I knew Francis was thinking about the amount of money we’d just spent and how he’d make up for it. He would have to get a job. It was quite likely that he was more frightened by the idea of getting a job than I was by the conversation we had earlier.

“I used to go skiing in the Alps when I was younger,” Francis said, turning his nose up at the roadside chalet. “This is a bit dismal, isn’t it?”

It was not ski season. There was no snow at this altitude, and we were one of maybe five cars in the parking lot, and they must all have been passing through, like us. The restaurant could have been a fixture in a ghost town. We sat a table for two by the window, barely talking. I was not particularly hungry; Francis ate all of his meal and half of mine. Naturally, this meant that after lunch he claimed of indigestion and stomach pains.

“I won’t be able to drive,” he said.

I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “Then let’s walk for a bit.”

“In the rain?”

“It’s easing up. Maybe it’ll do you some good.”

He groaned, but didn’t argue. Francis’ stubbornness was rubbing off on me, and I was determined to outlast him on this one. There were a couple of paths leading away from the chalet towards the different ski runs; a map labelled one of them as Richard’s Run, and since we had already stopped in the serendipitous St Francis, we followed the trail up the slope of the mountain. You weren’t supposed to walk on the runs, I didn’t think, but it was off-season, and neither of us had ever much cared for rules.

Francis was never dressed for walking; I was only a little better that day. I led the way up the path and Francis lagged behind, grumbling about the rocks, or the wet dirt, about how he wished we could see some snow, since we were all the way out here.

He had eviscerated me in the car earlier, so I thought I might attempt to return the favour: “Would you stop complaining?” I said. “It’s all you ever do.”

“I’m ill,” Francis sniffed.

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t use that as an excuse for everything. You’ve been like this as long as I’ve known you.”

“No, I mean—” His footsteps stopped, and when I turned around I saw him leaning against a tree. “I’m off my meds. I still have some for emergencies, but… I can’t afford any more without my inheritance, so I’ve been cold turkey, just to see what it’s like. If I’m worse than usual… you know. It’s not strictly my fault.”

“Jesus.” I stopped too. My stomach was turning itself over. “You didn’t tell me you were on meds.”

“You saw me taking them in the hospital!”

“I thought those were just… I don’t know. For a wound infection, or something. I don’t know how these things work. I swear to God, Francis, I wasn’t trying to force you off your meds.”

“No, I know.” He sighed. “You were right, though. I couldn’t have gone on like that. Even drugged to the gills I would’ve wanted to kill myself. I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll be happier in Los Angeles.”

We were high up in a clearing between pines. The wind was strong and it whipped the rain about our heads. Either the wind was making me queasy, or this: Francis had been behaving erratically over the last three days and, now that I had the alarming context, I felt like an idiot for not noticing. He’d even said to me he needed drugs to sleep at night, and I thought he was joking. I didn’t know when he would be able to get a job, when he’d have enough money to start affording to look after himself again, whether he’d even be well enough to work. He said now that he’d be happier in LA, but how long would that last?

“I’m sorry,” I said. There wasn’t much else I could say.

“You’re inconsiderate,” he said, “I complain too much. I’d say we make a fine pair.”

I really, really couldn’t dispute that.

We’d wasted enough time up here; I began to walk back down the mountain, and Francis followed. The ground got worse as the rain picked up. Francis was unsteady on his feet and, without saying anything, I held out my arm for him to take; he did so gratefully.

The rain showed no sign of slowing. We were going to be drenched long before we made it back to the car. “Want to make a run for it?” I said.

“You’re such a child,” Francis said.

He let go of my arm and took my hand in his, and we ran.

There were some terrifying moments on that drive to LA, but I never feared for my life more than pelting down the hazardous slope, full-tilt, hand-in-hand with Francis. It was hard to see where we were going through the rain, and there were multiple moments when I felt my foot pass over something hard and jutting out of the ground. If not for our momentum I think both of us would have fallen on our faces and died, then and there. Francis was laughing the whole way. He really was mad, I thought.

The path levelled out towards the end, a long, flat-ish stretch towards the parking lot. We tumbled to a stop under the minimal cover of a small lodge by the carpark; me with my back against the wood, Francis pressed flush against my chest. I kissed him. Of course I did. He was standing right in front of me and his cheeks were dusted pink from running, his chest heaving. There was no-one else around. I didn’t stop to think that I was sending mixed signals. I simply couldn’t imagine being here, now, and doing anything other than this.

“You were right,” I said.

“Richard.”

“I—I’m—”

“This is really not the time for talk,” he said, and kissed me soundly.

I don’t know how long we spent there. It was still raining heavily. so we ran back to the car, sodden but smiling. I think I kissed him when we sat down, too. He took the driver’s seat. I suppose he had gotten over his upset stomach.

 

* * *

 

The plan to keep to cities for our stops long since abandoned, we drove until we were exhausted and found a motel in a town called Richfield, Utah. It was a bit more expensive than I would have liked; Francis, in a fit of either generosity or idiocy, paid for the room. Twin beds, as usual. More room than the last couple of places. It was close to midnight. The moment we got in, Francis lay down on the bed by the window and fell right asleep.

As ever, it was not so easy for me. Though we’d long since recovered from our earlier excursion in the rain, my hair had dried at all sorts of odd angles, so I took a shower to fix it. I spent longer in the shower than I intended; I stopped paying attention to what I was doing, and stared at the green-tiled wall, thinking.

There was a lot on my mind. Most of it was to do with Francis. Francis’ lips, his hands, the way his face looked when he dropped his affected manner and smiled. And then there was me: the fool who’d upended his life without considering the gravity of what I was doing. We had always been close but now I really wondered what he saw in me, if anything. He didn’t want to be with me but he let me kiss him. I didn’t even know why I wanted to kiss him. It was a happy impulse under certain circumstances, shadowed by the war I was waging with myself. I was not straight. I was having trouble accepting that.

I got out of the shower and changed into my bedclothes while Francis dozed. I felt shy around him; even though his eyes were shut, he was facing my way as I changed. The lights were all on, and that hadn’t seemed to disturb him, so I turned on the TV to distract myself—there was no way I was getting to sleep. I muted the sound; it was programmed to a teleshopping channel when I turned it on and, though I could not be bothered to change it, I could not afford what they were selling. Anyway, the announcers on these infomercials were always so shrill. The lack of volume was no great loss.

I sat on the bed nearest the door and propped myself up on the stiff pillows. They were selling watches, a brand I’d never heard of. Watches for _him_ and _her_ , promised the text at the bottom of the screen. The first one had a square face and a thick, gold-coloured metal strap. The dial was saturated with information. I imagined the announcer, an ageless man in a timeless suit, explaining all its functions in an enthusiastic but not abrasive tone. He had a sleazy smile. The next watch he showed had plastic casing— _for the man with an active lifestyle_ , I imagined him saying. Or one caught in the rain for four days straight.

Francis’ watch was on his right wrist. It would’ve been on his left, but I suppose it chafed against the bandages and his scars. It was a classic sort of watch, plain face and black leather band, second hand ticking gently in the quiet. Both of his hands were resting in front of him on the bed, his watch face-down. I hadn’t had a chance to change his bandages.

I looked back at the TV. The man had moved onto women’s watches. _Delicate and elegant!_ said the bottom of the screen. _Only $79.99!_

I switched it off and got up. The lightswitch was by the door, and I went there now. Our window overlooked the highway and, a second after I flicked the switch, the beams of light from a passing car swooped across the room through the sheer curtains, illuminating my path to the bed by the windows. I knelt by Francis and unfastened his watch, slipping it from his wrist and placing it on the bedside table.

He stirred, opening one eye. “Richard?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Move,” I said, and he shuffled aside so I could climb in beside him.

It was the best I’d slept in years.

I woke with the sun. Francis had wrapped himself around me like a starfish to the bottom of the ocean floor, and I was embarrassingly hard. Fine, I thought, he didn’t want to be with me. I wasn’t yet capable of thinking of my own feelings in such concrete terms, but I knew, lying there in the misty orange light of dawn, that this was how I wanted to wake up every morning. If he’d have me. We were going to live together indefinitely—there was time to work it out.

I shook him awake. “We should get on the road.”

Francis groaned, and buried his head in the crook of my shoulder. “Let’s stay here a little longer,” he said. He shifted, stuck one of his legs between mine, and said, “I think you want to stay too, hm?”

“Shit,” I said. Thank God we were situated so that he couldn’t see me blush. “I’m sorry.”

“Stay a while,” he said.

Stupidly, I said, “I thought you weren’t trying to convince me to sleep with you.”

“I suppose it’s different when you’ve done most of the work to convince yourself?” He laughed. “I was bullshitting. Let’s fuck.”

I think that was all I needed to restore my confidence, not that I’d ever had much of it in the first place. The bed was narrow, but we’d managed to fit in it overnight, and there was enough room for me to push Francis onto his back and position myself over him. I looked down at him; he really was a picture. I’d always known this, and I’d always convinced myself that I was being objective about it. It was freeing to stop pretending.

We only hit the road around eight that morning. It was worth it.

 

* * *

 

We didn’t talk about it, after that morning in the motel; something had shifted, though, and we both knew what it was. Francis was sunny despite the persistent rain, aglow in the gloom of the passenger seat. The roads were so simple here but he navigated anyway, and called out things he saw by the roadside, laughed at how silly the red dirt and the cacti looked in the rain. At one point, when we stopped for gas, I was looking at a map and suggested we take a detour to the Grand Canyon; Francis responded, quite cheerfully, “Oh, don’t, you know I’ll only try to jump in.”

“Don’t joke about that,” I said.

“At least you know I’m only joking,” he said, and, though anyone could’ve seen, leant across the gear shift to kiss me briefly on the cheek. “Let me see the city first, then you can take me back out here to get used to the desert.”

I didn’t know what to do with myself. I sat there blankly for a few moments as my mind worked over the realisation that I was dating Francis Abernathy. The first time we spoke, he’d asked me in Latin if I wanted to sleep with him, and I’d spent every moment since telling myself that I didn’t. Look at us now. I laughed.

“Oh, get used to it,” Francis said. I looked over and expected to find him rolling his eyes at me, but he was looking away, red in the face.

We pressed on, and stopped at a roadside diner in Nevada for lunch. Given how obtuse I was being, it’s not surprising that I didn’t consider it a date at the time, but it was definitely our first. The place was rowdy, even in the rain, and we were able to slip unobtrusively into a corner booth. The food was oversized and underpriced and irredeemably greasy, and I had absolutely no appetite for any of it. I ended up with a banana split, which Francis picked for toppings when he was done with his grilled cheese.

I was glad he was starting to enjoy himself, but I was flagging. I think it was too much at once. All this, packed into a few days on the road. I had expected this to be all about Francis, Francis escaping from his unhappy life, Francis getting used to working for a living, but in the end I was the one who needed someone to pull me out of my shell. I didn’t like to dwell on my inner life—I knew only too well that it always ended in a depressive slump—so this was draining.

Francis picked up on this. He nudged my foot with his, under the table. “I’ll drive.”

“Maybe for a bit,” I said. “I’ll take over once we hit California.”

“You don’t have to. Why don’t you let me look after you for a change?”

I hadn’t been thinking of what I was doing as _looking after_ him, but I suppose he was right. I cared for him, and I wanted to look after him. I didn’t know how I felt about the reverse. I knew what it was like to let someone else look after me—now I thought of Henry, that winter he spent by my side in hospital—and I had seen Francis dote on other people, but these two phenomena had never intersected until now.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll sleep a bit. Promise you won’t get us lost.”

“Believe it or not, Richard, I do want to get you back to Los Angeles in one piece.”

I summoned up a smile. “Thank you.”

Francis leaned his chin in his hands and looked at me across the table. I liked to think the look on his face was fond. His tone certainly was, when he said, “I’m glad we’re doing this. I mean, that you convinced me to come back with you. I almost asked you to stay in Boston, you know.”

“You did,” I reminded him.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I prefer it this way.”

I did, too.

 

* * *

 

I woke up at sundown, in what was very clearly California. These were the wide roads I’d grown up on, the mountainous landscape, the dry stretches of nothing in particular. The rain died down to a light shower, the dark tarmac was starting to go back to grey. The last time my eyes had been open was somewhere outside the roadside diner, east of Vegas. Shocked I’d slept so long, I sat up with a start.

“I was wondering when you’d come to,” Francis said. “There must have been something in that banana split.”

“I’ve barely slept since I got to Boston. I guess I was catching up.” I had slid down in the seat; now I pulled myself up, and rubbed my eyes. “Thanks for not waking me.”

“My pleasure. You looked so peaceful, I couldn’t bear to.”

Francis reached one tentative hand across the gearshift and rested his palm on my thigh. I didn’t know how to react; at least he didn’t seem to know what he was doing, either. He left his hand there for a few moments and then withdrew it.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was talking mostly to myself when I added, “We’ll work it out.”

“Oh, some good news,” Francis said lightly, “I had a bit of a jaunt in Las Vegas while you were passed out.” I must have looked horrified, because he added, “Don’t worry, I only left you in here alone for about fifteen minutes. I ducked into a casino to play some slot machines. There wasn’t much left of my savings, so I thought… well, I made a hundred dollars, if you can believe.”

“Should I congratulate you on being reckless?”

He laughed. “It’s symbolic. It means there’s hope for me yet.”

“I could’ve told you that,” I said.

“Bless you, Richard, you’re many things, but you’re not the kind who inspires hope in other people.”

That, I thought, was fair.

When I was more awake, we pulled over at a service station on the outskirts of LA, to get the car ready to be returned. We had it washed and filled the tank; we were lucky there were no dents or scratches, despite the hail, just layers of dirt and bird droppings and dead bugs. While the car was being washed, we went for a walk around the area, past local groceries and diners, personal injury lawyers’ offices and seedy laundromats.

“Is this like the town you grew up in?” Francis asked me.

“No,” I said. “This is bigger.”

He shuddered, but then seemed to force down his disgust. “You’ll take me to your hometown one day, won’t you?”

“Not to meet my parents, I won’t,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Just so I can know you better.”

“You’ll hate it.”

“Like I hate you?”

“If not more,” I said.

Francis smirked at me, and I softened. I knocked our shoulders together. We had done well for ourselves.

From there, it was a short drive into the heart of Los Angeles; Francis saw skyscrapers and lights and glued himself to the window, curious and, I’m sure, happy to be back in a city. I found it in me to relax, relieved that we’d made it. Not once on our trip had I been able to envisage it ending. The last few days compressed themselves into a lifetime worth of adventure, and I was a different person. I was better for it.

We dropped the car off and paid, and then walked to the parking lot where I’d left my car, on that day I rushed to Boston. I lifted Francis’ suitcase into the boot. I was happy to be home; happier still that we’d come here together.

 

* * *

 

Of course, I could never be happy for long. I had never set foot in an amusement park, but I was certain I knew what a rollercoaster must feel like: it was the path my mood traversed every day, the continual ups and downs that dwelled alongside my depressive personality. I apologised to my supervisor for the time I’d taken off and went back to working on my dissertation. As was my custom before the trip to Boston and back, I spent long days on campus and long nights at my desk.

It was easier with another person around. I often forgot to eat; Francis almost always cooked dinner. I stayed up too late and found it hard to get to sleep; Francis was already in bed, asleep, and lying beside him always made it easier for me to do the same. This is not to say our coexistence was not frequently fraught: it was several months before Francis was able to afford to see a psychiatrist again, and I would not say I was completely blameless either. But we were, from the start, completely in love with one another—I can say that now, without hesitation—and that was something that never faded. There were some days when I felt like I only loved Francis because he was all I had left of my time at Hampden; other days, I was convinced I had been in love with him since the moment I first saw him, that I had only been nervous around him because I hadn’t been able to articulate my feelings to myself. Most days it was somewhere in between: I settled on making it my truth that I had fallen in love with him while running down a ski slope in Colorado. I never asked him for his version of events. I got the feeling I would not come off very flattering from his side of the story.

In time, Francis got a job. Well, I recommended him for a job, at the library on campus where I most often studied. He was there with me so often; whenever I asked him to help me find a book, he got sidetracked by finding different books, in entirely the wrong places. I said to him one day, “Why don’t you just work here?” To my surprise, he thought it was a brilliant idea. From there, it was easy for him to introduce himself to a couple of classics professors. Eventually he spoke to the dean of studies and was allowed to transfer his credits from Hampden so he could complete his degree. To be honest, I think they were simply impressed that he had been one of Julian Morrow’s last students. It took him a while to get back into the groove of college life—he complained that everyone around him was so _young_. But when he did settle, he flourished. He bloomed so brightly that I could never take my eyes off him.

There were always nights where I didn’t sleep at all. There were nights where Francis woke up shouting, and when all I could do was hold him close while he sobbed into my shoulder. There were nights when both of us saw Bunny, or Henry, or the twins, in our dreams.

The days made up for those nights; days where we would drive to campus together and then go our separate ways, when later I’d make my way to the library and say, “Francis, was it? I was hoping you could help me find this book.”

He’d look up like he hadn’t been expecting me and fix me with a customer service smile. “Sure. Why don’t you tell me what it’s called?”

I would give him only a vague description, and we’d walk to the shelves together, where he would point out a couple of titles to me. I’d put on my reading glasses—a relatively recent development—to squint at them, assessing.

“Yes, that’s the one. Thanks.” I’d take it, and then linger a moment. “Say, what’s a guy with an accent like yours doing all the way out here?”

“Some madman asked me to run away with him,” Francis would say. He’d grin at me, properly. “And I did.”

**Author's Note:**

> for people coming here from the beginning note of caution: if you'd like to skip the graphic scar description scene, it begins with “You have to change my dressing,” and ends at the next horizontal rule.
> 
> -
> 
> thanks for reading!! i am new to this fandom but here to stay, so please drop by, say hi, in the comments box down below, or on [dreamwidth](https://necessarian.dreamwidth.org/) or [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/renaissance).


End file.
